SYRIA (6)

I suspect that only a handful of people in the whole world know both who carried out the chemical weapons attack in Syria and why, and I don't think that that handful includes politicians. Civil wars are messy affairs at the best of times, and it is more than a possibility either that it was the work of a low-level commander acting on their own initiative, or a simple blunder. Politicians love to see patterns and clear motives in all things; sometimes there just aren't any.

Being both a trained lawyer and a successful politician, President Obama loves patterns more than most and quickly found himself in the unenviable position of promoting that "something must be done". Quite what that something would be was never quite made clear, not least because there were huge risks involved. Hitting the Syrian regime's remaining chemical weapons stockpiles would probably kill as many people as in the original attack; hitting other military targets, which are often situated in civilian areas, would still result in "collateral damage".

Thankfully, the something has not happened, partly because the British Parliament voted against David Cameron's recommendation (the first time a British Government has lost a vote on a matter of war and peace in more than two centuries), and partly because the President decided to ask Congress for support before he acted. That gave a window of opportunity, which the Syrian Government and their Russian allies have gratefully exploited. Syria, one of the few countries in the world which is not a signatory to the U.N. convention banning the use of chemical weapons, promptly signed up to it, and agreed to hand over its existing stocks, through Russia, to the U.N.

This is a smart move by the Syrians, for two reasons. First, chemical weapons being tricky things, it will take a long time to sort out the mechanics and details; verification, transportation, security etc etc. Secondly, while all this is taking place, it distracts attention from the civil war which is still ongoing and which is being waged with ordinary weapons. The Government thinks it is winning this war, so by the time the world's diplomats have finished discussing chemical weapons and turn their attention back to ordinary ones, they will be in a position to negotiate with the rebels from strength.

I have just finished reading C.V.Wedgwood's history of the Thirty Years War. The Peace Congress that would eventually end it opened on 4 December 1644. This was thirty two months after the date originally fixed by the delegates for its start, and forty six months before the date the peace treaties were eventually signed. During this seven-year period, the war continued as before, as each side sought to use success on the battlefield to extract concessions at the negotiating table. Only when the exhausted parties realised that neither side was ever going to win a comprehensive victory could the necessary compromises be made. I said in my previous post on Syria that the parties there were not yet ready to compromise. So the next months (and years) will probably involve lots of high-level chemical weapons talk, and lots of low-level killing. As in seventeenth century Germany, the real losers will be ordinary Syrians.

Hegel once said that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I agree.

Walter Blotscher